Celebrating Failure

1. This semester I failed in my attempt to take Intermediate Microeconomics. I am a transfer student from Ole Miss into the Economics department and this was my first higher level course at the University of Florida. It happened to be my teachers first course at the University as well. It is safe to say that I did not respond well to his teaching and I had to drop the class early in the semester. After the first class of the semester, I knew I was already behind because I did not learn some of the math that they were using in class. Despite attempts at office hours and extra hours of practice, I was not able to teach myself the math and therefore I was at a disadvantage for the class. I was either going to fail the class or drop it so I chose the ladder and signed up for the math class that I needed.

2. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this experience. First of off, I learned that the education at the University of Florida is at a way higher level than Ole Miss. I had the required pre-requisites for this course, but the material at Ole Miss did not correspond with the material at Florida. I learned that I was going to have to adapt to the environment here and truly earn my degree with hard work and staying committed to my education. I also learned that Economics was a lot more math and not as many concepts that I anticipated from my research and prior coursework. All of these lessons that I learned have prepared me to be more successful in pursuing my degree in the near future.

3. Failure is hard. There is no doubt about that, but it is also an important aspect of life. Almost no people are successful with everything they do, so it is important to respond to failure correctly in hopes of making improvements in the future. I believe that all failures can have some positive impact in the long-run. As long as you learn from the failures and use the information to benefit yourself in the future, failures can be a blessing in disguise. I also think that people should not let failures effect them on an emotional level like most people do. It is important to bounce back from failure as quick as possible to not let any lingering effects creep back in. This class has changed my perspective on failure because I have been able to adapt and succeed in this course. After going back and reading my first couple of blog posts, they were not very good at all. They lacked creativity and were the bare minimum. Looking back on this now, I used these examples to improve my work in the future and I think that is what failure is all about.